Sam Johnston

Personal disclaimer: The views expressed in these posts are mine alone and not (necessarily) those of any current, future or former client or employer. As I reserve the right to review my position based on future evidence, they may not even reflect my own views by the time you read them. Protip: If in doubt, ask.

Sam Johnston is Director, Cloud & IT Services at Equinix, where he provides cloud computing expertise internally and externally for Europe.

Sam was previously the technical program manager for Google’s global tape backup program, where he worked in the Site Reliability Engineering team in Switzerland and gained deep knowledge of current, former and future Internet-scale server and storage platforms. Before joining Google, Sam worked at Citrix Systems and served as founder and CTO for a number of successful high-tech start-ups in Australia, France and Ireland. A computer scientist at heart, he was recently listed as one of the leaders of cloud computing, having been an active contributor to the cloud computing community since its inception (particularly in the areas of security, standards and interoperability).

Sam has advised and architected pilots for various European enterprises (including one of the earliest and largest commercial cloud deployments to date, started in 2006 with 35,000 users) and presented at a number of international conferences on the subject.

Sam earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Featured Blogs

James Urquhart claims Cloud is complex - deal with it, adding that "If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I'm afraid I have bad news for you" and citing his earlier CNET post drawing analogies to a recent flash crash. Cloud computing systems are complex, in the same way that nuclear power stations are complex - they also have catastrophic failure modes... more»

The cloud computing scandal of the week is looking like being the catastrophic loss of millions of Sidekick users' data. This is an unfortunate and completely avoidable event that Microsoft's Danger subsidiary and T-Mobile (along with the rest of the cloud computing community) will surely very soon come to regret. There's plenty of theories as to what went wrong -- the most credible being that a SAN upgrade was botched, possibly by a large outsourcing contractor, and that no backups were taken... more»

Almost a year ago I wrote about Google Chrome: Cloud Operating Environment and [re]wrote the Google Chrome Wikipedia article, discussing the ways in which Google was changing the game through new and innovative features... Similar features were quickly adopted by competitors including Opera (which Chrome quickly overtook at ~2%) and Firefox (which still has an order of magnitude more users at ~20-25%). more»

It's no secret that I don't very much like this whole private cloud or internal cloud concept... on the basis that while advanced virtualisation technologies are valuable to businesses they are a severe short sell of what cloud computing is ultimately capable of. The electricity grid took over from the on-site generators very quickly and I expect cloud computing to do the same with respect to private servers, racks and datacenters... more»

A rewrite of the Rich Internet Application (RIA) article is my latest contribution to Wikipedia following last year's full rewrite of the Cloud Computing article (which is now finally fairly stable and one of the main authoritative sources on the topic; according to the article statistics I've just done my 500th edit, or one every eight hours on average so it's about as up-to-date as you'll find). Needless to say I agree wholeheartedly with Mozilla's Mark Finkle in saying RIA is Dead! Long Live Web Applications... more»

There has been a good deal of talk of late on the important topic of security and privacy in relation to cloud computing. Indeed there are some legitimate concerns and some work that needs to be done in this area in general, but I'm going to focus today on the latter term (indeed they are distinct -- as a CISSP security is my forte but I will talk more on this separately). more»

Rather than blathering on to the blogosphere about the superficial features of Google's new Chrome browser I've spent some time studying the available material and [re]writing a comprehensive Wikipedia article on the subject which I intend for anyone to be free to reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license rather than Wikipedia's usual strong copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This unusual freedom is extended in order to foster learning and critical analysis, particularly in terms of security. more»